Otali

The Otali, or Overhill Cherokee, were Cherokee communities west of the Appalachian Mountains. Their towns were settled between the late sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries, and their speech became the distinct Otali dialect. Virginia traders reached them in 1673, opening a fur trade across the mountains.

The leading town shifted between Great Tellico, Tanasi and Chota; Tanasi gave Tennessee its name, while Chota was the de facto Cherokee capital for most of the eighteenth century. In 1730 Alexander Cuming had Moytoy crowned emperor of the Cherokee. The British built Fort Loudoun in 1756, only to lose it to a Cherokee siege in 1760.

After the Cherokee-American wars, the treaty signed at the Tellico Blockhouse in 1794 opened a decade of land cessions that ended the Overhill towns' independence, as the Cherokee center of power shifted south to New Echota.